(*You'll notice that most of those were updated to reflect clarifying reports. Welcome to Present Shock at its dumbest.)

We're going to dig into this tonight on the first edition of our new crowdfunding show The CrowdCrowd, but I wanted to weigh in on this before then.

I see these developments as part of the growing pains of the new indie ecosystem. The lesson to be learned isn't that "crowdfunding is only for the little guy" or that "celebrities shouldn't go begging".

The lesson is that you have to be crystal clear as to what you are attempting to pull off when you produce a film while using crowdfunding even as a component of the funding. Heck, especially if you are using it only as a component.

It is all too easy to take one piece of the puzzle that doesn't seem to fit with the established information and spin out an entire false flag theory… whoops, for a second there I thought we were talking politics.

Any filmmaker worth their salt is always going to want a bigger budget for their work. What matters is that when you are bringing a community into the process–especially a community that is unfamiliar with the Byzantine world of finance–that you apply all of your communication savvy to make what is happening clear.